Helmuth Rilling, a German choral conductor who was the first to record the complete sacred cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, died Feb. 11, 2026. He was 92.
Born into a musical family, Rilling received his early training at Protestant Seminaries in Württemberg before studying organ, composition, and choral conducting at the Stuttgart College of Music. While still a student in 1954, he founded his first choir, the Gächinger Kantorei. He later traveled to Italy to complete his studies with Fernando Germani in Rome and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena.
Rilling expanded his musical operations in 1965 by establishing the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart to serve as an instrumental partner to his choir. That same year, he began a 24-year tenure teaching choral conducting at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule. His international reach grew in 1970 when he co-founded the Oregon Bach Festival, where he eventually won a Grammy Award for the world premiere recording of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Credo.
The conductor spent fifteen years, from 1970 to 1985, recording all of Bach's sacred cantatas, a project that had never been completed by a single conductor before. This work led to his appointment as artistic director for a 2000 project that recorded Bach's entire catalog across 172 CDs. To support the study of these works, he founded the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart in 1981 and later established the Junges Stuttgarter Bach Ensemble in 2011.